January 23, 2014

Column: A Culture That Celebrates Abortion Wills Its Own Destruction

At a time when more and more Americans are coming to an awareness of how evil abortion is, President Barack Obama, the most fiercely pro-abortionist president in our history, is digging his heels in further.

This week, he made his annual statement glorifying this hideous practice on the anniversary of the infernal 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, which greatly restricted abortion laws.

Obama's statement was as unapologetic as it was grotesque, celebrating an abominable procedure that ought to be outlawed -- not glamorized, as the left does with it. Before you accuse me of hyperbole, be advised that Democratic National Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz wished Roe v. Wade a happy 41st birthday. "Happy"?

Obama said, "Today, as we reflect on the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, we recommit ourselves to the decision's guiding principle: that every woman should be able to make her own choices about her body and her health.

"We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to protecting a woman's access to safe, affordable health care and her constitutional right to privacy, including the right to reproductive freedom.

"And we resolve to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, support maternal and child health, and continue to build safe and healthy communities for all our children, because this is a country where everyone deserves the same freedom and opportunities to fulfill their dreams."

No one is trying to interfere with women's autonomy over their own bodies, except when another body and life is involved. It is sheer sophistry and misdirection to argue that abortion opponents are on a crusade against women's liberty. This formulation conveniently -- and repugnantly -- factors out of the equation the innocent child involved.

It is dishonest for Obama to couch this issue in terms of women's health. Most pro-lifers, in fact, acknowledge an exception in those rare cases when the mother's life is in danger. Women's health isn't the issue, and pro-abortionists know that. The only thing interfering with a woman's "choices about her ... health" these days is Obamacare. If maximizing health care choices were what is driving Obama, he would repeal Obamacare.

Nor does abortion have anything to do with privacy under any stretch of the English language; I don't care what the misguided Supreme Court said to the contrary in 1973. No amount of rhetorical legalese on "emanations" and "penumbras" can pollute our common sense into believing that a woman has a right to terminate the life of an innocent child she is carrying as a matter of constitutional privacy. No wonder some people have contempt for lawyers.

Obama has the audacity to talk about safe and healthy communities for all our children? Aborted babies are children, and Obama and his pro-abortionists are not making any of them safe. Indeed, since Roe, an estimated 55 million babies have been snuffed out in the name of women's choice and health and now children's safety? Now that's chutzpah! The number of babies killed in abortions in New York City in 2010 (83,750) would fill the seats in MetLife Stadium, where the Super Bowl is scheduled to be played this year.

But perhaps the most offensive sentence in Obama's statement was the last one, in which he attempted to fold the right to abortion into the American dream. Has he no shame? No amount of presidential spin will alter the irreversible fact that 55 million Americans were never given an opportunity to fulfill their dreams. How could any human being believe that preserving legal protection for other human beings to terminate the lives of yet other human beings is giving them an "opportunity to fill their dreams"? Are some people so dark-hearted that they consider killing babies an opportunity to fulfill dreams?

It is high time that people who can still find their moral compass through the nihilistic morass that is corrupting our culture start speaking out and quit allowing the left to turn our values, our language and, yes, our sanity on their heads. Postmodernism and moral relativism will lead to the destruction of all three, as the late Malcolm Muggeridge prophetically observed.

Some other civilizations, Muggeridge noted, were destroyed by external forces, but Western man has "had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over -- a weary, battered old brontosaurus -- and became extinct."